Monday, January 21, 2013

What is Bollywood’s role in changing Indian attitudes to women?

Could greater control over Bollywood help reverse a culture of female objectification in India? No, argues Mahima Kaul, but the roles of women in Bollywood films could still do with a makeover

In 1995, a movie called Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge swept
India. It became an instant classic and cult hit. The short synopsis of
the movie is that Simran, an Indian girl who grew up in the UK under a
very strict father has been promised as a bride to a young man in India.
Raj, the boy she fell in love with during a road trip in Europe follows
her to this small town in India where wedding preparation is underway,
and wins her family over. The movie, while comedic and heartwarming,
also revealed the tougher side of Indian society. Simran did what she
was told, as did her mother. In the end Simran gets to be with Raj, but
not until Raj has taken permission from her father to marry her. While
shining a light on the patriarchal nature of Indian society, in the end,
the love story is resolved through a negotiation between the two men. I
was 12 years old when it was released.

There
have been many movies in Bollywood since then. Some figures estimate
there are about 1,500 movies released in Bollywood annually. They are
filled with raunchy songs, “item” numbers — a gratuitous song which
features a scantily-clad woman often dancing for the pleasure of a room
full of men — and very minor decorative roles from the ‘heroine’. The
hero often harasses the heroine, who is somehow charmed by his behaviour
and falls madly in love with him. The portrayal of women in Bollywood,
and their larger effect on Indian society has been called into question
following the brutal gang rape of a young girl in the capital, New Delhi.
Many argue that Indian popular culture is full of misogyny, and
Bollywood too needs to own up to its role in fuelling this culture. As
Ritupurna Chatterjee writes,
“it will be highly presumptuous to assume that Hindi cinema is the root
cause of a spike in sexual assaults. But Bollywood and regional cinema
in equal parts, because of their reach, scope and influence, have a
larger role to play in assuming responsibility for the message it sends
out to millions of audience — some highly impressionable.” India’s
population has now
exceeded 1.2 billion, and even though literacy has increased quickly in
the past years, a little over 25 per cent of the country’s population
is still illiterate.

Is it fair to blame Bollywood, or even expect it to produce movies that adhere to a higher standard?
As Bollywood mega star and bad boy Salman Khan argued in an interview —
each movie has a good guy and a bad guy. It isn’t Bollywood’s fault
that people choose to follow the villain. The superstar also added that
if not the death penalty, rapists should be sentenced to life. Others,
like director Anurag Kashyap, agree with the general sentiment that
Bollywood, being such a huge influence for Indian society, has a
responsibility to produce movies that show women in progressive light,
but hold that censorship is not a viable way to achieve this goal, tweeting that moralising censorship would create “another kind of Taliban”.

By
the time I was 18, a movie called Dil Chahta Hai exploded onto the
scene and instantly became a cult classic. It is a story of three boys,
Akash, Sameer and Siddharth, who have a last road trip to Goa before
their “adult” lives begin. Fancy cars, beaches, no parental supervision
and even a romance with an American girl made every Indian teenager want
to go to Goa instantly. The second half of the movie sees the boys
struggling with ‘adult’ issues. Unsurprisingly, one of the plots
revolves around Akash needing to crash a wedding to convince his love
interest not to go ahead with an arranged marriage, while his friend
falls in love with a divorcee who dies in the course of the movie. While
the stories bring up different aspects of Indian society, and how women
are victims to its ways, they are mainly served up as plot devices to
show how the boys grow into men.

One of the biggest blockbusters of 2009 — I was 26 then — was a movie called 3 Idiots. It
dealt with the intense premium Indian parents and education
institutions put on rote learning as opposed to creativity. The formula,
using three boys to tell the story of education in India, again used
women only as accessories in the story.

The larger point being
made here is that even when a female movie character’s role is more than
decorative, the heavy emphasis on men’s problems make it appear as
though it is the Indian man who is complex with real problems and the
woman only serves as a support system. Movies have found new cities,
settings and even broader societal issues to tackle, yet, seem to be in a
state of arrested development when it comes to the power dynamic in
gender relationships. There are a few movies that have broken the mould
and present women as strong independent characters.
Women with not only professional lives and the confidence to stand up
to a man, but also the independence to make a decision for herself and
not be punished for it in the course of the movie.

Bollywood is
correct that it is free to express what it wants, and tell the stories
it wants. They have rejected censorship as a tool to “elevate” the kind
of content they generate. Some writers have argued that only blaming the
producers of pop culture is dangerous, and that the audience needs to
introspect as well — Shougat Dasgupta pleads with
audiences to “question the invariably sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,
plain stupid assumptions of the pop culture we consume”.

It is interesting then that many were shocked
by the message sent by one of 2012’s most highly anticipated movies,
Cocktail, the story of three young people sharing a flat in London.
Ditching his club hopping, alcohol drinking girlfriend, the leading man,
a womanizer, falls in love with the god fearing docile “good” girl.
What happens? His former paramour, played by leading actress Deepika
Padukone, then ditches her short skirts for salwar kameezes and
the neighbourhood bar for the kitchen to win him back. If this doesn’t
send the wrong signal about female empowerment, then what does?

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I have watched Hindi blockbusters ever since the early 1990s, what began as a sneery effort to track/analyse popular responses in this crazy country, I must confess, has turned me into a qualified admirer of masala movies. Most of them operate on a ‘formula’ of pan-Indian appeal, and that reassures me that the Idea of India is safer than one might otherwise fear. Not all movies act as unifiers, of course. Yet, by and large, India’s eyes of bridal beauty—to use an old metaphor—would not shine as lustrous without its song-and-dance cinema. It’s just that for its artistic/poetic stuff to reach as far as possible, one also has to suffer some of the crass packaging that goes by crass-market dictates.

No doubt, some item numbers are offensive, but several of them are superbly sung/done [eg: ‘Kajra Re’]. Most of them are mere modes of sexualized self-expression in desi contexts that viewers with Western sensibilities should not get too judgmental about. A lusty pelvic thrust, for example, could be the sign of a sexually demanding woman IN a position of command rather than AT the command of ravenous men raring to ravish her. Grant the benefit of doubt. [Note: Whether sexuality should be kept strictly private is an entirely separate debate]

Are Hindi movies misogynist per se? Am not sure. Are they socially regressive vis-à-vis the role of women? Many are not, but a disgustingly large number still appear to be. India is a vast country, and these could be a reflection of underevolved demand in conservative segments of the market. Yet, if such movies are spiked in the cans, they would no longer serve as indicators of real responses. Such censorship would leave us clueless about what’s really going on out there in the heads of millions. Remember, cinema often grants us a grasp of the unfamiliar in ways few other things can, and this purpose would be defeated if movies fell in line with familiar settings of modernity. Also, in allegorical films that rely on musical meta-narratives, character roles are sometimes used as subtle representations of collectives, and so their apparent lack of liberation in the depicted contexts need not be taken literally [eg: HDDCS, Devdas, DDLJ, etc].

Does mass movies set social trends instead of reflecting them? Again, am unsure, but the evidence on this deserves a closer look; and if it turns out they do, then filmmakers would need to exercise caution. But even here, it is gore and violence (including the sexual kind) that worries me most; in India, this ought to be strictly censored on practical grounds of harmony if nothing else. The aesthetics of item numbers may have declined since Kajra Re, but to say that they pose a threat to civilized life? C'mon. While masala flicks still need lessons in gender sensitivity, it would be silly to expect them to take a vow of prudery.

To be a bit more specific. In my opinion, Mashallah, Ishq Shava and Lat Lag Gayee are aesthetic and pleasing to the ear, Fevicol is not--even if it tells me about what's happening with pop culture in a way that the other three do not

Shoghat Dasgupta speaks sincerely but lacks proper understanding of Indian movies. This is true of 99% of elitist English speakers in India who know a little of the language but are essentially not qualified to judge what is foreign to them. Do this test. Ask one of these big talkers to translate the lyrics of a Hindi movie completely with every nuance of Hindustani/Urdu and see how they fare. It is a revealing test. It tells you about critics who know nothing except hoe to look down on what is alien to them